SOURCE: Spector, Robert Donald. “Observations on Schnitzler's Narrative Techniques in the Short Novel.” In Studies in Arthur Schnitzler, edited by Herbert W. Reichert and Herman Salinger, pp. 109-16. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.

In the following essay, Spector discusses genre distinctions between the short story and the novella in the five stories by Schnitzler that appear in the volume Viennese Novelettes (1931), including Dream Story.

While even the best literary critics have been unable to define adequately the short story, novella, and novel, they generally agree about placing individual works within a genre and acknowledge a common ground for certain characteristics. No one was seriously misled when Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea was transplanted from its rather cramped space in Life magazine to the fullness of a Scribners' edition which had the most generous margins in recent book publishing. Moreover, an examination of the effect of...